Parnel Kershaw

Spouse of Robert Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

In Whitby the herring came in on the tide, and Parnel Kershaw was on the staithe to meet it. She was born there in 1491, on the Yorkshire coast where the River Esk cuts its narrow gorge to the sea and the red roofs climb a cliff toward the great Benedictine abbey on the headland. Her people were fisherfolk of no property, and the sea was the whole of their arithmetic. A boat went out on a good tide, came back or did not, and the women gutted, salted, barrelled and sold what it brought. Whitby's fish went inland in panniers on mules and in carts along the moor roads to Pickering, Malton and York, and in Lent, when meat was forbidden and every table in the north turned to fish, the demand was constant. Her mother's family had been selling ling and cod from the same stall for three generations, and Parnel stood at it before she could see over the board. The work was cold, wet and loud. A fishwife rose before dawn and went down to the quay to bargain with the boats, judging a catch by its eyes and gills and the stiffness of the flesh, and beating the price down by a farthing a dozen while the gulls fought around her. She gutted at the trestle with a short curved knife, rubbed the split fish with salt from the pans at the harbour's edge, and hung herring in the smokehouse over oak chips until they turned the colour of old brass. Her hands were red to the wrist for eight months of the year. She learned to count in fish, in dozens and long hundreds, in barrels and lasts, and to keep her prices in her head because a woman who wrote them down invited a quarrel. She was, by every account that survived, broad, weathered, quick to laugh and even quicker to correct a customer's arithmetic. Her voice could carry across the harbour in a north-east wind. She met Robert Proctor in the year she turned twenty, when he came down to Whitby on business connected with the White Ledger. He was the younger son of the York marriage between Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had taken his mother's name and, with it, the Yorkshire lands that went with the Proctor side. What drew him to the coast the family never quite explained, though a rumour of something in the alum-stained caves below the cliffs served as a reason. He bought smoked herring from her stall on three successive days, tasted the third and said it was the best he had eaten. She said that it was the same herring as the first two, and he laughed. They were married in 1511, in the church of St Mary above the harbour, with the abbey bell ringing overhead and half the quay in attendance. His family, brought up in law and ledgers, were startled by the bride. Parnel was untroubled by them, and the fish-market's wisdom, that a good bargain is a mutual one, served her as well at a Proctor table as at a stall. She was taken inland to a household of ledgers, guildhalls and a long-established habit of quiet. It took her longer than it should have to be told what her husband was. Robert came home with mud on his boots and blood, not his own, on his sleeve; he vanished for nights at a time; there were locked chests. She worked it out before he told her, from the herring. A man who could not explain why a shipment of salt had been shut in a cellar with a lantern and a stake on top of it was a man with something to hide, and she had bargained with liars all her life. When he finally sat her down and began, she said that she had wondered when he would get round to it, and asked whether the house had a proper smokehouse. Robert, who kept the Proctor line's tally and was a vampire slayer as his mother had been, took this as a sign that he had married rightly. Their first child, Parnel Proctor, was born in 1512, and named for her mother, which caused a small confusion in the household that lasted seventy years. The next year Robert was called north with the Yorkshire levy for the Flodden campaign, which drew men from every northern parish, and Parnel ran the house on her own for the autumn, with an infant on her hip and a servant girl who had never seen the sea. She went on selling fish, from a stall in the Shambles at York, since Lent did not stop for wars, and she kept a small purse of coin hidden behind a loose brick, the fishwife's habit against bad seasons. Robert returned in October unhurt. A daughter, Joan Proctor, followed in 1521, and a third, Jane Proctor, in 1527. Parnel raised all three as she had been raised: to be useful, to count, and to be wary of any bargain that sounded generous. Her husband's work brought its own share of anxiety. She learned to read the signs of a hunt going badly, the way Robert ate, the way he came in by the back door, and to know when to say nothing. She quarrelled with him twice in thirty years about whether a daughter should be trained for the work, and the second time she lost. Joan, the middle child, was the one who wanted it, and became a slayer in her own right; the Proctor ledger holds her story separately. Parnel never pretended to be reconciled to it, but she sharpened Joan's knife for her with the same short strokes she had used on a gutting blade and made sure the girl went out well fed. Her eldest, Parnel, and her youngest, Jane, stayed at home and took up ordinary trades, and she counted this a private victory. Nobody in the family could recall her ever mentioning it. The risings that followed the dissolution of the monasteries came close. In the autumn of 1536 the northern host gathered around York, and the guildhalls and the minster close filled with men and rumours. Robert, at the head of the Proctor household, kept his own counsel on the politics and spent the weeks doing what the ledger required, which was to guard the family's papers and the city's cellars against the disorder of a crowd. Parnel fed a good many of the men who passed through the house. When Whitby Abbey was dissolved in 1539 and its great church fell into the hands of a commissioner, she went home to see it, standing on the cliff for a long time in a wind that almost took her hood. She had grown up under that bell, and her mother's name was on its list of benefactors. She said afterward only that the herring did not care whose land it was landed on. In 1544, at the age of fifty-three, she was thrown from a horse on the road between York and the coast, going to see the sea once more. The mare had been quiet for twenty years and shied, for a reason nobody found, at a hedge near a ford. Parnel struck her head on a wall and died before the doctor could reach her. Robert was thoroughly shaken, and outlived her by two years, dying in 1546. They were buried in a churchyard near the Proctor lands, and someone, probably Joan, cut a small herring on the stone, which the churchwardens, unaware of its meaning, let stand. The White Ledger records her as the wife of Robert Proctor, and adds, in a later hand, that the household was fed and the accounts honest. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the fishwife who married a slayer, and brought to the Proctor line a talent the ledgers had never measured: the ability to bargain in the dark and be paid for it.